


All Our Tomorrows

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Rising Through the Dark [2]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Demisexual Outsider, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Emotions galore, F/F, Female Wyman (Dishonored), First Time Blow Jobs, Fluff, Human Outsider (Dishonored), Low Chaos Corvo Attano, Low Chaos Emily Kaldwin, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Porn with Feelings, Post-Game(s), Romance, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, kinda slow burn anyway, poor little guy he just needs a friend
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2020-04-24 19:24:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19179841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: The Outsider is human, Corvo is falling in love with him, and it's all kind of a confusing mess. But everything will be all right in the end. The important thing is that we try.(A companion toWhen It's Right It'll Find You,of snippets, missing scenes, and continuations in different POVS.)





	1. is there room for one more son

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to wait to post this until [When It's Right It'll Find You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651547) was complete (I'm done writing it, just not done posting it). But I got impatient, as is my way. 
> 
> This is arranged like its companion fic in that the chapters will be only in semi-chronological order. I strongly recommend you read that fic first; there's a lot here that'll make more sense/be more meaningful if you do. 
> 
> Thanks as always for reading, and I'd love to know what you think.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After his first meeting with the boy who used to be the Outsider, Corvo takes a few moments to try to get his head around what's just happened - and what might be coming next.

It's only after Corvo has given the maid her instructions and watched her walk away that it hits him, the full force of it, and he has to find someplace to sit down on for a while.

The one he locates just so happens to be a windowseat in an alcove overlooking the terrace and the waterlock beyond, and he sits there, half turned and leaning on his elbow and gazing out at the day. At the gulls swooping and diving offshore. At the sky—overcast earlier in the morning and clearing now. At a barge moving ponderously past the waterlock and the Tower and further up the river to whatever dock onto which it'll unload its cargo. At the Tower guards moving like beetles into and out of the lock itself.

At the pale, black-haired boy still sitting at the table, whose eyes are not black at all. Whose eyes, in fact, are strikingly devoid of color and very bright, almost as if they're soaking up all the light they were denied for forty centuries. Making up for all that time lost to darkness.

Corvo took it all in so placidly and now he's not altogether certain he can maintain that appearance.

The boy has lowered himself back into the chair and is looking at the table, at the wine and glasses, and all around him with what is, even at this height and distance, an extremely obvious lack of any idea regarding what to do next.

Was it unkind to simply leave him like that? So blatantly lost and in so much confusion? For a few minutes there he almost felt something akin to genuine sympathy; he himself has looked that lost before, or he's guessing he did, not having made a study of mirrors at the time. He felt that lost, anyway. The first few months in Dunwall, when all his confidence and cocky boldness utterly deserted him and he was wandering through a world darker and colder and less vivid in almost every respect than the one he had spent his life in to date. Yes, Dunwall was exciting in its way, cosmopolitan after a fashion, a City in a sense Karnaca never truly was, but the homesickness was immense and worse every day, and he felt himself slowly drowning in it. 

And then the letter came, about his mother. And after that he didn't know what the fuck to do. Until the first day _she_ spoke to him. 

A child, only. But a wise child, a brave child, and of course he didn't see her as a child for very long. Empresses, he supposes, always have to relinquish their childhood too early.

He was drowning and someone held out a hand to him. Someone _was_ kind, when he most needed it. Where would he be now if it hadn't been for her? Sometimes he used to wonder. Sometimes he still does. Best case scenario: likely an officer in the Tower guard, a decent job but nothing especially remarkable. A less rosy scenario, which he thinks might have been even more likely: he would have ended up languishing somewhere in the City Watch when he stopped being a novelty. Oh, yes, excellent at swordplay. But very quiet, not especially well-liked, not inclined to make friends—he had friends in Karnaca, but he never really _made_ them and he’s not good at it even now. He would have kept to himself, lived by himself, possibly drank a bit too much, possibly never spent enough time in the sun, possibly allowed his world to flatten and flatten until he truly was drifting through his life in a drab, poorly-done painting.

Alone. 

It's not only that she gave him a title, a purpose, and eventually love and a child. It's that she _chose him._

That boy down there looks so alone. And _has_ been, utterly and totally alone, for four thousand years. Except for the times when he's reached out… and touched someone.

 _What did that mean for you?_ he thinks. _Was it merely about making your little experiments? Testing something, placing a particular weight on it to see if it would hold or break?_  

 _Or was it more than that?_  

“I never thought you talked to me because you wanted to,” he says very softly, to no one at all. “I thought you just did it.”

The boy's voice again, so totally devoid of any subtle knowing smugness, so low and uncertain, so unlike he's ever heard him sound. I _don't think I really_ wanted _anything._  

Corvo is not good, at fifty-five, at making friends. Not out of whole cloth, anyway, not starting from scratch. And he doesn't think he precisely wants to be friends with that boy down there, who used to have fathomless black eyes that saw forever and was as endless in his way as the Void itself, and who now barely remembers what it's like to be the very thing he is. And who has no name. Or might as well not have one.

What the hell _should_ Corvo call him, anyway? 

Which is when something else hits him: that he meant it, that he's not going to make the boy leave. That he sincerely doesn't want him to. That Emily might be a challenge, but he's going to do his best to bring her around… because he wants this boy to stay. Because he's interesting, yes. 

But mostly because he's alone. 

Corvo sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. _Interesting_ is a curse. 

Regardless, the name issue is going to have to be addressed. Sooner or later.

 


	2. hear the gathering sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sparring with Emily after the Outsider's first meal in Dunwall Tower, Corvo comes to some realizations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been really looking forward to digging more into Emily's side of this. And Emily and Corvo being bffs naturally just always makes me happy. :D
> 
> Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

He knew this would be awkward.

Emily neatly side-steps his advance and hits him with a lunge of her own—controlled and precise enough that he has to retreat and feel for more solid ground, turning her sword aside as he does. That's not the awkward part; she was already closing in on equaling his skill when Delilah launched her coup, and after Emily regained the throne and released him, their first time in the practice yard was a lesson for _him_ in just how far she'd come in those few weeks. Her new powers aside—and with a curiosity he'll admit was almost childlike he begged her to demonstrate those for him until with rolling eyes she relented, and at least now after all these years she knows how it feels to be endlessly pestered to do something—she was more than close to his equal. She _was_ his equal, fully, and she is, and he'll never be able to describe how good it felt to realize it.

As if he'd completed some all-important task, and done it well. Which of course he has. Doesn't every teacher hope to see their student surpass them? Doesn't every parent hope to see their child rise above them? 

Every teacher or parent worth anything, anyway, as far as he's concerned. Regardless, it made him so happy.

But this is still awkward. Not that she's easily matching him, but everything _else_ is what's awkward, from the hours before supper to supper itself to now. He and she have a standing date every other evening to practice like this, so that much is draped in a veneer of normality, but even that…

He got himself into this. He has no one but himself to blame. It's not even fair to blame the Outsider, if it comes to that.

And it had been difficult to ignore the twin impulses he felt toward amusement and sympathy, seeing him at such a complete loss the way he was at the table. Not a shred of the old coldly imperious confidence. Nothing remotely godlike. Simply what he saw in those first moments on the terrace: a nervous boy in a situation far more uncomfortable than he's prepared to cope with.

Trying gamely to cope anyway.

The way she's working with him is casual, as it always is unless he's earnestly trying to push her. But there's a tension hidden in it that he can detect in every one of her movements, in every muscle, and finally it seems to him that the best thing is to bring it to the surface, take it out and look at it between them and see what can be made of it. If anything.

But he already knows he's not revising his decision.

He parries her lunge. “You really hate this, don't you?” 

Emily grunts and blows an annoying loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “I don't hate it. I just don't _get_ it. And don't explain the mechanics of it to me again, I told you, I get those. I get them enough, anyway.” 

This time her advance is more difficult to handle and he has to retreat, his boots scuffling in the dust. “So what exactly don't you get?”

Abruptly she pauses, lowering her sword and slicing it irritably through the air by her knees. She didn’t make any kind of fuss when he requested that she give his own back to him—he's sure some people might consider it appropriate to pass that particular baton but the truth is that he's simply too attached to it—but he can tell that she misses using it, and he's secretly resolved to have a copy of it made for her next birthday.

She exhales heavily. “He fucked with you. He fucked with me. Yes, in the strictest sense I suppose you could argue he also helped us. He definitely wasn't on Delilah’s side in the end.” Another slice. “But it's at least half his fault that we were dealing with her anyway. I know he was once just a boy. I know that what was done to him was horrible, I'd never say it wasn't. But how much damage has _he_ done? How much suffering has he caused? Just for the sake of _seeing_ _what_ _would_ _happen_.”

Corvo wipes a thin film of sweat off his brow. “That was Daud’s thinking. According to him, anyway.”

“And maybe for once Daud wasn't wrong.” There's bitterness in how she says the name. In all these years, she's rarely spoken of the man who murdered her mother, but Corvo is perfectly aware that the decision to spare him never entirely sat easy with her. Of course at least part of her hated him. Probably she feels a vestige of that hatred even now that he's gone from the world. It would be difficult for her not to. 

Despite the tendency toward mercy that appears to have rubbed off on her. 

She sheathes her sword, unpins her hair and combs the loose strands back from her face, gathering it into a ponytail in her fist and starting to resecure it. “You're not pissed at him.”

“I didn't say that.”

“Yeah, but you’re not. I can tell.”

“I'm not sure how I feel,” he says quietly. And he’s not sure. He rather thinks he might feel a number of different things simultaneously, and not all of them are in agreement with each other.

Emily’s mouth quirks. “Well, whatever, I know what you're like when you're pissed off, and you're not right now.”

“It's hard to be pissed at him,” Corvo says simply. He follows her lead and folds his sword; practice time appears to be over in any case. “You saw him, you saw how he is. And like I said, you _didn't_ see him when he showed up.” He breathes a laugh. “I told him he was pathetic. He agreed with me. And he was.” 

“Pathetic,” Emily repeats, then shakes her head and echoes his laugh. “That much I agree with too.” She inclines her head toward a long bench set to the side of the yard, on which sits a pitcher of water and glasses. “C’mon, _father,_ I'll buy you a drink.”

The water is good and sweet and cold, and he dampens the end of a towel lying beside the pitcher and presses it to his brow. He still feels strong, still extraordinarily flexible and quick even when he isn't calling on the aid of magic—and it's an unspoken rule between them to leave witchcraft out of these sessions—and he's fully confident in his ability to hold his own. If he wasn't, if he had a single suspicion that he might be unreliable, he'd step down. It would be agonizing, and he tries not to think much about the fact that the day will eventually come when he can't perform this role anymore… but he'll do it. It would be a betrayal of her trust not to.

That day hasn't arrived, and stars willing, it'll be kept at bay for years yet. But he spars with her, and even if he hasn't weakened, in his bones he can feel that it's coming.

“Seriously, though,” Emily says presently, studying him with dark eyes as keen as her blade. “Why did you tell him he could stay?”

For a long moment, Corvo doesn't answer. Not because he's holding back; it's that an answer isn't readily forthcoming. He has no one feeling where the Outsider is concerned; perhaps there isn't only one answer. But she also hasn't asked him for only one, and he guessed that she won't be surprised if her offers her several.

“I know how you feel about him,” he says slowly, at last. “I wouldn't even argue with that. He did all the things you said he did. But you…” He draws a breath and meets her gaze, working the hem of the towel absently through his fingers. “I know you remember those days. After… When we were at the Hound Pits. I know you always saw more than people thought you did. But you didn't know him. Not the way I did. And the world was so…” He shakes his head and raises his eyes to the reddening sky. “The ground disappeared from under me, and he was there,” he murmurs. “He was a smug, arrogant bastard… but he was _there,_ and even when almost everyone else turned on me, he didn't. I wouldn't have survived if it wasn't for him. I think… Now I think I might have lost my way if he hadn't been there. Talking to me. Reminding me of what was at stake.” He lets out a soft, dry laugh. “I know I'm not explaining this very well.”

He lowers his head in time to see Emily’s lips twist. “You're not saying you're _grateful_ to him.”

“I don't know.” He rolls a shoulder. “Maybe part of me is.”

“So that's why?”

“No, I don't think that's all of it.” He pauses again. Because he did hit upon one other explanation, sitting on that windowseat and looking down at the boy on the terrace. “You know what it was like when I first came to Dunwall.”

Emily nods. She's heard the story. “You were homesick. Lost.”

“That's right. I was homesick and lost and I had no one… and then one day she was there, and everything changed.” He gives her a faint smile. “She didn't have to pick me. She could have ignored the… that _weird Serkonan boy who won't talk to anyone._ But instead she picked me up, she dusted me off, and she put me on a path.” His smile widens a touch, and he can feel that it's also growing wistful. A little sad. “In a way she saved me.”

Emily looks at him in silence for a few moments. Her expression is difficult to read—or for someone else, someone who didn't know her better than perhaps almost anyone else, it would be. But he can see the gears turning. “You think he needs you to save him.”

“I think he's all alone and he has no idea what the hell to do with himself. And it's… It's probably hard for me to turn away from that.” He lifts his chin at the wall, at the city beyond. “If I’d sent him back out there, he'd likely have been able to survive, but perhaps not much more than that. I felt alone, but he’s…” He sighs. “I don't believe either of us could ever truly know what it feels like to be alone the way he is now.”

Once again, Emily is silent. The silence stretches out, and he sits and takes a swallow of water and returns his gaze to the sky, and he allows the silence to stretch. He's said his piece; he's given her the answers he has. If she still doesn't understand, that'll be unfortunate, he'll be sorry for it…

But he won't change his mind.

Finally she heaves a breath and swipes a hand down her face, leaving a smear of dust on her cheek. “All right. I do get it. I don't like it, but I get it. I won't fight you on it.” 

He glances at her, gives her another smile—and licks his thumb, reaching up to wipe the dust off her cheek. She makes a face and bats his hand away, and just like that the tension is gone.

“You weren't going to fight me anyway.” 

She laughs. “Oh, I’ll fight you. Just not on this.” She licks her own thumb and swipes at the dust herself. Manages to get most of it. “I'm not going to be nice to him.”

“You don't have to be.”

“Good.” She lifts a brow. “Can I keep threatening him?”

He huffs. “Not too much. He's scared enough as it is.”

“Oh, I won't do it _too_ much. He might get used to it if I do.” She rises and arches her back, groans when it cracks. “I'm beat, I'm going to curl up with a book. Join me?”

Evenings reading in the library on the overstuffed couches in front of the fire have been a semi-routine with them since shortly after she was crowned. In those days she was stricken with restless nights, jumping at shadows and plagued by nightmares, and he discovered that reading to her—as Jessamine once did—tended to calm her enough to fall asleep. But it was important that it be in the library and not in her bed, and he knew without having to ask that it was because in her bed, the memories of happier bedtimes were too fresh and too raw.

So together they made some new ones. And not long after, when she was old enough to prefer to read on her own, they simply never abandoned the practice.

The prospect of doing that now is decidedly appealing. A glass of whiskey, the fire, and something gently soporific—not boring but just dry enough to flatten out his thinking. But he waves a hand at her. 

“You go on. I'll be up in a bit.”

Her brow furrows. But she doesn't prod; she bends and presses a quick kiss against his forehead, turns and walks away. He watches her go, fingering the damp hem of the towel again… but he's only half seeing her.

Superimposed over the world, a pair of endless black eyes stare at him. Then gradually they fade to a clear, strange gray. 

He looks at them for a long time before he gets up and goes inside to read.

 


	3. it gains the more it gives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A couple of weeks into being lovers, and to Corvo it feels like he and the Outsider have only just begun to learn the rules of a whole new world. And the lessons are delightful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About time this thing took a turn for the smutty. ❤️

For a moment, the Outsider doesn't seem able to do much more than stare at him, and Corvo can't control the amused smile that curls his mouth. A while ago he internalized the fact that this man is impressively inexperienced, at least when it comes to many of the main points. But surely he must be able to grasp what's about to happen.

After all, he’s been in Corvo’s position often enough. 

It was initially almost startling to him, how quickly and enthusiastically the Outsider figuratively—and sometimes literally—dove into the business of sucking cock. Certainly he'd seemed to enjoy it that first time nearly two weeks ago, and Corvo had no reason to believe the Outsider wasn't sincere, but immediately afterward uncertainty still gnawed at him. It was so abrupt, how it happened. It was so rough. The Outsider had asked for it, had practically begged for it, had seemed to exult in the force of it and in the way Corvo let go and used him, but all the same.

Would he think better of it later? Would he decide he wasn't comfortable with how it had gone? Would he feel that the lack of proper reciprocity had been unfair? Corvo wasn't altogether sure he could argue that last point. With Jessamine he was extravagant in his generosity; she owned him, ruled him, and it was everything he wanted. At the times he was rough with her, it was because she demanded that he be so.

Not that she ever remotely had to push him into anything.

But it's not like that here, now. With this man, with this boy—with this being who used to be a god—it's different in so many ways.

Corvo is perfectly aware that not everyone is like him. That in fact he might be relatively uncommon as a man in what he enjoyed with her. He couldn't, he believed then, assume that the Outsider would be another exception.

Yet as it turns out, _rough_ is exactly and frequently to the Outsider’s taste.

It's positively adorable, how unprepared he appears to have been for what Corvo has just done.

Corvo shifts between the Outsider’s legs, runs his hands slowly from the Outsider’s knees up along his inner thighs and stops just short of his groin. The Outsider jerks like he's been poked and clumsily tries to push himself up in the armchair, and the firelight and last of the sunset easing through the glass overhead dyes his pale skin a reddish gold.

He looks surprised and confused and even slightly uncomfortable, and he's also so beautiful he freezes Corvo’s breath in his chest.

_If you wanted me to worship you,_ he thinks, _I would. Oh, how I would._

The Outsider licks his lips. “What are you doing?”

Corvo releases a quiet laugh, leans in and rubs his cheek lightly against the side of the Outsider’s left knee, his hands now settled on the tops of his thighs. “Are you seriously telling me you can't figure that out on your own?”

The Outsider laughs too—more of a cough—and his gray eyes flick to the glass of wine on the little side table next to the chair Corvo was, until a minute ago, lounging in. What he's not saying is clear enough: _This is not what we were just doing and you didn't warn me at all._

Impulsivity is something else Corvo has made more than clear is a component of how he engages in this kind of relationship. Care, discretion, but when he wants, he wants now. But there are some parts of this that the Outsider still seems to be in the process of learning.

He's used to this going a certain way. Even a change this minor might throw him a bit off-balance. If Corvo had spread his own legs and smiled and waved a beckoning hand, the emotional tenor of this would likely be fairly different. But it's more even than that; something else Corvo has learned—so far this entire relationship seems to be one long and complex and extremely unexpected lesson for both of them—is that when it comes to the Outsider and sex, there are actually multiple things which don't always go the way they might for someone else.

And not merely because he used to be a god.

Sometimes the Outsider truly doesn't want it. Sometimes he only wants it in a particular way. Sometimes—rarely but it does happen—he appears to find it difficult to be touched at all. Sometimes he's downright skittish, and Corvo knows perfectly well that it's not about him. It's not that he's doing something wrong. He doesn't entirely understand what it is, but he knows that much.

So he has to be careful. Sometimes he has to read the signals and make sure that it's all right.

He nuzzles the Outsider again, gives his thighs a squeeze—that latter more friendly than lustful. “I can stop.”

“I—No.” The Outsider swallows and releases a short breath. With faint relief, Corvo feels the tension under his hands beginning to slacken. “No, that's all right, I…” He blinks and something cinched up behind his eyes that has nothing to do with his muscles is loosening too, uncoiling, and his legs fall open a little wider as his fingers ghost over the crown of Corvo’s head.

“I don't want you to stop,” he murmurs.

“Good,” Corvo says, a murmur also, and his hands finish their journey and he cups the already hardening bulge at the apex of the Outsider’s thighs, and the sound the Outsider makes is low and needy and strained. Corvo moves his hands aside and leans in, presses his lips over the Outsider’s fly, grins when the Outsider’s hips twitch upward. “Because I _really_ want to suck you off.”

The Outsider moans, louder and rough at the edges, and his head falls limply against the back of the chair with a soft thump. Corvo grins wider and starts to undo the Outsider’s fly. Now that he's gotten the explicit go-ahead, he's going to fucking well take what he wants.

Again, an approach which, the Outsider has made clear, he frequently adores.

How many other people have done this? He muses on it as he slips his fingers into the Outsider’s trousers and the slit in his smallclothes, glides his fingertips across hot, almost silky skin, thrills to the responding twitch. Not when the boy was a god, the creature he'd been in those thousands of years, if he'd ever deigned to engage in something as human as fucking, wouldn't have done it this way. But the boy when he was still a boy, when he was a human being with human desires and human pleasures—who touched him this way then? Did anyone? The Outsider himself isn't certain, doesn't remember, and it makes no real difference to Corvo in any case, whether he's the first to have him or the second or the seventh, or any number.

But he wonders. Idly, drawing out the Outsider’s cock and giving it an unhurried stroke, he wonders.

It doesn't matter to Corvo if he's not the Outsider’s first lover, not really. But at times like this he dimly hopes he is. He hopes he's the first one to ever coax the sounds out of him, to ever make him squirm this way, feel the Outsider stiffen and shudder when he drags his lips up the underside of his cock and sweeps his tongue over the slick head. Raising his eyes as he curls his lips around the shaft and slides down and up again, agonizingly slow, and seeing the Outsider’s face, how he's lost in it, pain and pleasure indistinguishable in his expression, his hands clumsy as they comb into Corvo’s hair—has anyone else ever seen him like this? Has anyone else ever taken him to this place?

He hopes he's the first, and he doesn't entirely know why. It's not about jealousy. It's not even about possessiveness. It's something else, something _other,_ and there's really so much about this that he doesn't understand.

Not yet. But he'd like to.

He's moving faster now, gripping the Outsider’s cock at the base and easing into a steady rhythm, taking it as deep as he can, and the Outsider is whispering his name and rolling his hips, panting little fragments of words he can't quite complete. It might be pleading, heartfelt and desperate.

This once-god nearly praying to him. It's not the first time Corvo has heard it, but it never ceases to be mildly stunning.

He could stretch it out. Take his time. Take more than his time, really make the Outsider plead with him, torment him, release him only when he's at the brink of madness. Later he might. Now what he wants is to see that release, hurl the Outsider into that completion, accept it when it floods into him. He tightens his fist and his lips and licks as he sucks, groaning his own pleasure—groaning louder when the Outsider’s voice twists into a hard whine and he bucks one last time and goes rigid and comes in a rush of slightly bitter salt, and Corvo swallows it all and doesn't let up until the Outsider pushes weakly at his head and whimpers for him to stop.

Maybe one day he'll just keep on going and see what happens.

For now he stops. Remains on his knees with his head resting against the Outsider’s thigh, listening to his breathing slow and deepen. He’s plenty hard himself, but his own pleasure will keep.

When it comes to _who was here first,_ it’s been such a long time since he was with a man this way. Decades, since long before Jessamine. But he almost feels like those times don't genuinely count, regardless. They were never like this.

Perhaps in some ways they're each other's first.

The Outsider exhales. Corvo looks up; the Outsider is gazing into the fire, the flames caught by his eyes and glowing in their depths. His eyes used to be utterly devoid of illumination of any kind; now to Corvo it's as if that clear gray is always full of light.

“Why are you so good to me?”

Corvo smiles, a bit quizzical. He kisses the Outsider’s softening cock, takes amused satisfaction in the way his breath hitches. “I like you.”

The Outsider shakes his head. He looks vaguely but truly baffled. “I don't understand.”

“You know, I don't either.” Corvo kisses him again, his thigh this time. “Do you need to?”

“Not if you don't, I suppose.”

They lapse together into quiet. The Outsider’s fingers continue their gentle stroking through Corvo’s hair. The fire burns lower. At some point Corvo is going to have to get off his fifty-five year old knees and take the consequences of being on them for so long—he's still more than limber enough for fighting but age is age—but for now he can't imagine wanting to be anywhere other than right here.

No, he doesn't need to understand. But he's learning, all the same. An old man and he's still learning.

That strikes him as a good way to be.

 


	4. may you find your shore at the end of the day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Returning at dawn from a run across the Dunwall rooftops, Emily finds the Outsider and strikes up a conversation. It doesn't go in the directions she expects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I really need to a) write Emily POV, and b) write these two together.
> 
> 💗

At dawn she finds him on the bank of Coldridge Canal, which is unexpected and strange—not that unexpected and strange aren't intrinsically the norm where he's concerned, but still.

He's sitting crosslegged on a flat rock near the water, staring out past the ominous hulk of the prison toward the mouth of the river and the gray sea beyond. Emily can't see his face from where she's standing, but there's something about the look of the back of his head that's telling. Of _what,_ she isn't entirely sure, but something has happened.

The times she spoke with him in the Void, when he was who he used to be, he was always difficult to read emotionally, because what emotion was present in him wasn't in any respect human. Similar in many ways, to be sure—his irritation at Delilah’s maneuvering had been easy enough to discern. His cool interest and sardonic amusement at seeing Corvo captive and Emily fleeing, at the echo of family history, at the way she allowed herself to be dependent on what he could give her—she discerned that as well, and a healthy part of her despised him for it. But apart from that, what did he feel, to the extent that he felt anything? He was _enigmatic_ to a new extreme of the word. The final clarity was just how much he was concealing from her, which was nearly everything.

These days she looks at him, and the palpable force of everything he feels is sometimes almost painful to behold.

Once her anger at his being in the Tower at all had faded, she marveled at how a creature who was once so far from human could now occupy his own humanity more intensely than anyone she's ever met.

Although he still isn't properly _of_ this world, for all that he exists fully within it.

He remains the Outsider.

Now he's down here at first light, and while his habits are odd at the most normal of times, this is odd even for him.

She considers merely leaving him be. Strictly speaking, she doesn’t dislike him, but she's emerging from the flowing, meditative mindset that her nighttime runs across the rooftops always put her in, and it's a mindset that makes her generally prefer to be alone. But she softly clears her throat and shuffles her boots on the rocks to announce her presence.

He starts a bit, turns and looks back at her with wide eyes. Tension, she notes. Not alarm…But maybe he was seeking the same kind of solitude she was after.

So yes, she might still go, if he makes it plain that he'd like her to. It's not as if she has any claim on that particular rock.

“Are you all right?”

He breathes a laugh, gives her a half shrug, turns away again. “Fine,” he murmurs—and that's a word people tend to employ when they're not anything of the sort, but in this case she doesn't actually believe it's a lie.

The truth is merely a lot more complicated.

She steps closer. She really should go. Relations between them have warmed a good bit—she's made a genuine effort to thaw them now that she's seen just how much Corvo cares for him—but she wouldn't say that they're precisely friendly. Yet simply leaving him here to brood feels wrong.

“Just fine?”

He shrugs again. She can see the outline of his face in profile, and his colorless eyes are distant. As if he's somewhere far away over the edge of that oceanic horizon, sailing to parts unknown. 

“Can I sit?”

He glances up at her, his faint surprise unhidden. But he gestures at the rock beside him and smiles crookedly.

“It's your empire.”

“Doesn't mean I'm going to be a jerk about it.” She sits down, crosses her legs like him and exhales. She's been running hard tonight and the stretch at the tops of her thighs and in her hamstrings feels good.

The speed and the strength and the reflexes he gave her. Whatever his motivations, the fact remains that what she has was a gift from him. Albeit not one without certain strings attached.

“You're out here early.”

“So are you.” He tosses her another minute smile and pushes his hair back from his face. It's disheveled as if he's been sleeping, but there are shadows beneath his eyes. “I was awake anyway.”

Corvo has hinted that the Outsider has nightmares. Has hinted that they're terrible. She can draw her own conclusions regarding their content and she's felt genuine sympathy for him; whatever horror she and Corvo have both been put through, she would never argue that any of it is worse than being abducted and slaughtered like an animal and thrown into four thousand years of cold, lightless, _nameless_ prison.

Because that's what it was. The Outsider barely talks about it—and no wonder—but she's gleaned almost more from what he doesn't say than what he does.

He didn't want what was done to him. And she's been able to sense how much he dreads the memory of it.

This, she thinks, is one of the core differences between him and Delilah, possibly the most significant: Delilah hungered for godlike power, lusted for it above all other things, but the Outsider, although he was every bit the abused and suffering child she was, never asked for it, and if the chance to return to it was offered to him, he would flee from it as fast as humanly possible.

 _Humanly_.

He doesn't want to remake the world. He never did. Even when he could have, even when he had the power to easily do so, he chose not to.

Now he simply wants to live in it.

“You were out in the city,” he continues. He fiddles with a couple of pebbles; they click softly against the stone and each other. “Dancing around on the rooftops. Sometimes I wish I could do that.”

“You can leave anytime,” she points out. “No one has you locked up.”

He shakes his head. “I can't leave the way you can. You and him.” He pauses, staring down at the pebbles sliding between his pale fingertips. “When I go out there, with everyone else, all the _regular people…_ I don't know, it doesn't feel right. I don't belong.”

Emily cocks her head. It's not that he isn't customarily candid with her—the Outsider doesn't seem to be capable of anything else—but this is more than he usually tells her in terms of unasked-for detail.

“Do you feel like you belong in here?”

“I don't know,” he repeats. Then: “I’d like to.”

For a moment, neither of them speaks. The sun hasn't yet crested the horizon, and the water in the canal has smoothed out and settled into the glassy stillness it always subsides into before dawn. It laps gently against the rocks, rippled here and there as insects skim across its surface. Here and there the wider ripples of a fish darting up to eat one.

“It's not just about all the time I wasn't… in the world,” he says at last. “You know how I was on the streets before? Before—” His mouth twists with pain and distaste. “Before it happened.” _Before I was murdered_. “I don't remember much of that time, but… I don't think I felt like I belonged then, either.” He sucks in a breath, and the constant movement of his fingers ceases. “Now and then I wonder if that's part of why they chose me.”

“Lots of people feel like they don't belong. I sure as hell didn't.” Emily’s lips quirk dryly. “Mother dying didn't help with that, but even when she was still alive, I never got to be just… with people. Like you said, regular people. I never got to be normal. Empresses don't get to be normal. Ever.”

“You aren't normal now. You wouldn't go out at night otherwise.” He turns his head, his keen gaze settled on her face. “You couldn't stop doing it even if you wanted to. Neither could he.”

Emily frowns. This line of discussion isn't exactly comfortable. “I guess not.”

“I didn't do that. I didn’t make you that way, I mean. I think maybe I _exacerbated_ it, but I didn't do it.” Something in his eyes softens. “That's who I always came back to, in the end. People like you, like him. The _outsiders_. Now of course I know why.”

“You didn't know then?” She arches a brow. “I thought you knew everything.”

“I thought I knew more than I did,” he says quietly. “I knew about other people. I didn't know the first Void-damned thing about myself.”

Still quiet. But there's heat behind the low tone. Frustration, bone-deep—and just a hint of ugly disgust.

 _Void-damned_. Yes.

“I don't think most people really know themselves.”

“No, they don't.” He tilts his head up, blinking at the sky. People blink like that when they're fighting back tears. “Last night he said he loves me.”

She stares at him.

Gradually it penetrates, and it's dizzying. What the fuck should she be _feeling?_ What does one feel about something like this? Should she be upset? Should she be struggling to grasp it? She struggled with it when Corvo first told her that the Outsider was here, and she struggled when he told her that the two of them were together, albeit struggling of a very different kind. Her mother. Corvo telling her mother in front of Emily, with every part of him except his words, that he loved her more than his own life. There's all the difference in the world between _sleeping with_ someone and _loving_ them.

But what Corvo said then, telling her that things between him and the Outsider had changed. Were changing.

_I’m not replacing her. I’d never try, I never could. You know that. That's not what it's about._

She's dizzied by this. But the source of the vertigo is not remotely surprise.

Stars’ sake, she's been seeing it clear as crystal this whole time.

Clear as his eyes.

“No one ever said that to me before,” the Outsider says, hushed. He wipes one-handed at his face and lets out a shaky laugh; so she was correct about the tears. “Or I don't remember it if anyone has, I suppose it comes to the same thing.” He looks at her. He didn't get all of it; there's a patch of wet sheen on his left cheek. “Does it bother you?”

“I don't know,” she murmurs. And it's true. “I don't… I don't think it does, no.”

Which is also true.

He ducks his head. “All right. Good.” He’s silent a beat, and then says, tentatively, “I'd like us to be friends, you know. You and me. I really would. I don't know if that’s possible,” he adds a bit hastily. “I don't expect it, I don't expect anything. But I'd like it. I love him, you see, and I… I would. That's all.”

 _Friends_. Once she would have said that was absolutely fucking impossible. Not only that she didn't want it but that it literally _could not happen;_ one isn't friends with a being like this, and the fact that the being in question is no longer the way he was shouldn’t make a tremendous amount of difference. The Outsider isn't a god anymore, but he is who he is and he did what he did, and the thought of the power he held over her, the way he toyed with her, with Corvo, with _everything,_ for thousands upon thousands of years…

A boy sitting on the rocks in the new light of a day not yet fully taken its shape, gazing at her with unshed tears shining in his eyes and telling her that he loves her father and, hesitantly, that he’d like for them to be friends.

He looks so young. He looks younger than she can remember ever feeling. Young, and more than a little lost.

But trying.

Once she would have answered that what he says he wants is impossible. Now she picks up one of the pebbles scattered around the cracks in the rocks, weathered and polished by the water. It's flat, almost a disc, and she turns it over in her hand.

“Do you know how to skip stones?”

He shakes his head.

“You know what it is, though.”

His mouth quirks. It was, she’d be willing to own, a silly question. “Yes, I know what it is.”

“One of the guards taught me when I was a kid. His daughter was grown and in the Navy and he hadn't seen her for a long time, said I reminded him of her.” She tucks the stone against the crook of her thumb, winds back and flings it at the water. It hops across once, twice, three times, four in all before sinking.

She exhales sharply, annoyed. “Used to be able to get six, no problem.”

“It's been a while?”

“Years.” She hunts around, locates another stone. “Look, you hold it like this. See?” He accepts it from her, tries uncertainly to mimic the placement. She takes hold of his hand, positioning it herself. “Needs to be lighter. Don't squeeze it quite so hard. Then when you throw it you just release. There, try it now.”

The Outsider tries. The throw is clumsily and poorly leveled, and the stone hurtles into the water and vanishes with barely a _splop_. He shoots her a look, brow furrowed.

“Try again.” She finds him another stone, profers it with a curve of her mouth. “You were terrible at cooking when you started, right?”

He blows an exasperated sigh through pursed lips. But he tries again. It's a failure but not quite such a dismal one, and without prompting he plucks a third from between two larger rocks and with a whip of his arm he sends it arcing toward the opposite bank.

It skips once. Once only, but it does. And the Outsider is a fabulously complicated person, a tangled knot of total and consistent confusion, but his pleased smile is as simple and pure as anything she's ever seen.

They practice. By the time the wind picks up and the water is too rough to be much good, he's managed three skips and she's worked her way back up to six. So it seems fair to her to consider it on the whole a rousing success.

She nudges his shoulder, pushes herself to her feet. “C’mon. Breakfast.” She yawns and arches her back. “And then I need to go the hell to _sleep_.”

The Outsider looks up at her. He's smiling again, very small. But warm.

Hopeful.

She offers him a hand. He takes it and she pulls him up with minimal effort; he's very light. Almost more than he appears as if he should be.

 _Of course he is,_ she thinks. _He's still making himself._

_He's still becoming._

As they clamber together up the rocks and back to the Tower, she realizes that she feels no particular need to work out what that means.

 


	5. don't want to struggle with you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night after the Outsider comes to Corvo's bed and their relationship enters a new phase, Corvo finally finds a way to tell Emily. Spoiler alert: It's awkward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this isn't a conversation I'd ever envy anyone needing to have. 
> 
> ❤️

He doesn't know what he expected Emily to say, but as it turns out, she says nothing. She merely stares at him, her mouth slightly open and her dark eyes slightly widening, and he senses all he can do at this point is keep quiet and wait for her to finish processing what he's just told her.

Wait for her to decide what she does want to say, when she finally says anything at all.

They've paused on a rooftop in the Old Port District. He called the pause. It was mostly spur-of-the-moment; he's been intending to tell her all day about what happened last night when the Outsider came to his rooms and his bed, has been waiting for the right moment and for her to be in the right mood to handle it, and finally an hour ago—the moment they left the Tower, in fact—he came to the conclusion that the right moment and the right mood weren't going to present themselves, and it won’t help matters if he has to admit to her that he waited another day to tell her. It’s better to simply leap and trust that one way or another he’ll find a place to land.

Stars know he's done that often enough.

But he does sense that it's good that he's done it now, when they're out of the Tower and they have some distance from the Outsider himself, if for no other reason than that the Dunwall rooftops and shadowy alleys are the closest they're likely to come to neutral ground.

Only now that he looks around, he realizes that this isn't neutral ground at all. Across the broad, quiet street below where they've stopped is a tall tower, as crumbling as it was a decade and a half ago. Preserved in that ruined state as a landmark, a site of historical importance—although Emily hadn't particularly wanted it to be so.

Beside it is the Hound Pits Pub.

It’s well into the small hours and its windows are dark, but for one. When it reopened after the interregnum, it resumed its trade as an inn in addition to a pub and arena for hound fights. But it was also designated a historical site and kept just as it was when it was the headquarters of rebellion and the base of the Royal Protector’s campaign of justice and restoration. Its status has resulted in it serving a long series of elite guests. Tonight at least one of the rooms is occupied.

Not the attic. The attic is open only as a museum.

Emily didn't want her tower marked and preserved. Corvo didn't want the attic to be anything but an attic. But the people need to be allowed to remember what's happened to them in their own way. They need to be given space to process it in the manner they decide is best for them.

Emily needs that space now.

_He and I… I can't explain how it happened. It just did. I know it's beyond strange, I can barely understand it myself. But we’re… together. We have been for about a week. Last night it went further than it has so far and I decided… It’s serious enough that I had to tell you._

_I'm sorry I didn't before. It wasn't right to keep it from you for even a day._

At last Emily crosses her arms. Her expression is unreadable. The lights of the city glitter off the Wrenhaven behind her, and it looks as if she's surrounded by fireflies. Something twists in Corvo’s chest, aching gently; now and then it hits him hard, the simple fact of how much he loves her. For so long he's treasured two things above all others and made it his singular mission to honor them both: Jessamine’s memory, and his daughter.

For the first time since he kissed the Outsider in the pavilion, he's afraid that he's finally failed in that mission.

A lie of omission is still a lie. And he has never outright lied to Emily. Every truth, no matter how painful and difficult, he's found a way to give her once it was her truth to know. The fact that he's done that eventually in this case may not make all that much difference to her.

And fairly so. If she's angry with him now, she has every damn right to be.

“You're together,” she repeats slowly. “You're _together_ together.”

It’s a clumsy way of putting it. He's almost embarrassed to verbally dance around it like this; blunt honesty tends to be what he prefers when blunt honesty is possible. But it also seems ludicrously awkward to make the situation more explicit by describing the details of _what they actually did in Corvo’s bed_. Emily isn't squeamish, especially not after everything she's been through and everything she's seen, but he doubts she'd enjoy having those particular images rolling around in her head.

There is so, so much here to be uncomfortable about.

So he simply nods.

“I have one question at this point,” Emily says, still very slow. Very careful, as if she's evaluating each word before she speaks it aloud. “Are you _completely_ out of your fucking mind?”

He laughs. There isn't a whole lot else to do. The whole thing is ridiculous. It's been ridiculous since the beginning. It's been ridiculous since the Outsider showed up at the Tower as bedraggled and pathetic as a stray hound pup. The ridiculousness reached its apex that night in the pavilion when all at once every loose strand wove together and knotted around the two of them, and every second of it since then has been utterly, comically ridiculous.

He nods again. “Probably.”

“He's—” Emily stares at him, her mouth working silently. Then: “Corvo, he's the fucking _Outsider_.”

“He's not—”

“ _Shut up_.”

Once he would have told her sternly to watch her tongue, Empress or no Empress, because her technically being his sovereign didn't mean he wasn't still her father. Now he merely does as he's told and shuts up.

What he was going to say wouldn't have helped matters anyway.

“I'm not…” She turns away, her arms dropping loosely to her sides, and then she raises her left hand and the Mark flares, and in a faintly glowing purple streak she snaps herself through the air to the roof of the pub.

Corvo waits a moment, then follows her.

Nimbly, she darts across the top of the building and halts at the opposite side, gazing at the tower. Directly below her is the window that led from his attic to the walkway across the yard. The walkway is no longer there, but Piero’s workbuilding remains, almost entirely as he left it. Beyond, with the crescent moon rising over the river beside it, looms her tower.

Corvo stops behind her and stands in silence, waiting for whatever comes next. Without turning, Emily lowers herself to sit at the edge of the roof, her legs dangling and her hands clasped between her knees.

“Where the hell do I even begin,” she murmurs, and it doesn't sound like a question.

So he doesn't answer it.

She lowers her head for a few seconds, takes a breath, raises it. “How did it start?”

The truth is that he's not entirely sure. The truth is that it came out of nowhere, only it didn't at all; when it happened it was sudden but now he can look back over all those days and see through-lines, nodes of connection. Not only the days since he ordered the Tower guards to open the gates and let the stray hound pup in, but the days before that one, when the boy wasn't bedraggled and pathetic at all, when the boy was not a boy, when the boy was a god who saw forever and, in a coolly sardonic way, enjoyed reminding one of that fact.

Those days at the Hound Pits, the days of chaos, when Corvo felt dark things stirring inside him and both feared them and hungered to give in to what they were drawing him toward. The snatches of time at the shrines, wandering the Void, listening to what this god of secrets was whispering to him. Laying out the shape of things. The stakes. The delicate balance he could maintain or destroy, the razor’s edge along which he was dancing. Honor the memory of his love and the life of his daughter, give her an Empire worthy of her… or surrender to his fiercely burning lust for vengeance and blood, and see the Empire that betrayed all three of them in flames.

The choice was always his. But the Outsider never permitted him to forget what that choice meant.

Then when it was over, there was nothing. A decade and a half without his whispered secrets and his black eyes, although Corvo never once imagined that the Outsider had ceased to keep at least one of those black eyes on him.

“I found him on the terrace one night, a week ago. He was upset. He'd had a nightmare. More than a nightmare, it was… a memory.” He pauses. Probably he won't have to be more explicit than that; there's only one memory, so far as he knows, that could frighten the Outsider so badly, and Emily knows it as well as he does. She should. She was the one who told him about it. “I tried to get him to come back inside. Then I tried to… I don't know. I think I was trying to comfort him. He looked so alone. He looked so… so lost.”

Emily says nothing.

“I touched his shoulder. He told me not to. I asked him why not. He said…” Corvo’s mouth pulls into a small, wry smile. “He said he didn't want to do something he couldn't take back. And then…”

“So he wanted you before that.”

“I think he did, yes.”

“It makes so much sense,” Emily says quietly. She breathes a laugh and scrubs a hand over her face. “It makes so much fucking sense. I knew something was up all this past week, I _knew_ it—but I found him watching you one day not too long after he got here. When you were practicing. He seemed… distracted. He's been weird this entire time, I wrote it off as just more of that, but now.” She laughs again and shakes her head. “Now I get it.” Pause. “Shit. Why _him?_ Of all people.”

Again, he thinks of those times in the Void. He thinks not only of their brief and yet somehow endless conversations—although calling them _conversations_ isn't wholly correct, they were always so generally one-sided—but of the first moment he was drawn into that abyssal coldness, when the Outsider reached out and burned the Mark into him and sent power beyond what he ever dreamed was possible flooding into him. His skin. His body.

The raw intimacy of that moment. He only realizes it now.

All of it. It's everything. It's the totality of their shared history. His part of it is a fraction of a fraction in the vast expanse of the Outsider’s life, but it's theirs. It belongs to both of them and to them alone.

Where they began, and where they've come to now.

“I think it's because we know each other in a way no one else ever could. It's because at one point or another, one of us has been all the other one had. For a little while, in a way, he was everything to me. You were gone. Jessamine was gone. I was powerless. Broken. Surrounded by people I didn't know and didn't trust.” He lifts his left hand and closes it into a fist, extends himself outward as if he's about to aim a Blink, watches that blue-white flare beneath the leather bands. “And then he was there.”

“Could stay the same thing about him and me,” Emily points out, just a hint of terseness in her tone. “You might have noticed that I'm not _sleeping_ with him.”

Corvo shrugs helplessly. She's not wrong. He and she now have more in common than he ever wanted them to.

“But now he says _I'm_ all _he_ has,” he continues, “and I believe him. I look at him, and I see… He wants to be a good man, Emily. He really does. He doesn't like what he used to be.” _He_ hates _what he was. And I wish he wouldn't, because I don't_. “He's not much good at being human yet, but he's… trying. He gets up every day and he tries, and that's worth something.”

Emily frowns. “None of that is in the remotest vicinity of an answer, Corvo.”

Corvo rakes a hand through his hair. “I know, I know. I'm not explaining it very well.” His eyes return to the Mark. He makes it flare again, relishes the burst of heat racing up his arm. That unquantifiable length of time it was stolen from him was like the severing of a limb. “I'm sorry I didn't tell you.”

She shoots him a glance. He still can't parse the look on her face, but when she speaks the reproach in her voice is undisguised. “Why didn't you?”

He exhales as shame gnaws at him. “I think I just didn't know how.”

“Honestly?” She shakes her head. “I don't blame you.”

He takes that as a cue, sits down beside her. Not as close as he usually would, but it's better than standing behind her the way he was, stiff and awkward,

Not that this is any less so.

“Are you angry?”

“I should be. Shouldn't I?” She tilts her head to look up at the tower and smooths her hair back from her temples and brow. “I don't think I am, no. I'm…” Another sidelong glance. The moon edges her profile in silver. “It’s that it's _him,_ but also… It’s been so long since she died,” she says, her voice low. “I guess at this point I thought you would never want to be with anyone else.”

_Oh_. His stomach drops. This part hadn't occurred to him, at least not the way it should have. He's not exactly the widower in the cradle story, marrying the wicked lady who will be cruel to her defenseless stepdaughter until a magical sprite comes to put everything to rights, but even a grown woman might find this a difficult pill to swallow. Particularly under the circumstances.

And really, they've only just begun to recover from the waste Delilah laid to everything. Nothing will ever be the same.

“I’m not replacing her,” Corvo says softly. “I’d never try, I never could. You know that. That's not what it's about.”

“Yeah.” Emily swallows. “Yes, I know it.” Of course she does. Of course knowing that wouldn't make it easy. “Are you going to keep it a secret?”

His jaw tightens. He hates that question, hates that it’s even a thing she would ask. He enjoys the risk of discovery, the little thrill in sneaking around and stealing kisses and touches in dark corners, but the greater secret holds no pleasure and no thrill for him. And for so many reasons, this is a far more precarious secret than Jessamine taking him for her lover.

The Royal Protector, shamelessly bedding a boy with no family and no background—a boy who, despite his four thousand years, appears as if he might be not a day older than eighteen, and very plausibly younger. It’s known perfectly well that elite men of full middle-age and older sometimes form _close attachments_ to boys decades their junior, and across classes more general versions of those peculiarities on the part of both men and women are tacitly albeit not officially tolerated. People in Dunwall adore gossip, but at the end of the day it's wiser to avoid minding someone else’s business. But Lord Corvo Attano is not merely _elite,_ Emily’s reclamation of power is still shaky, and the Abbey has been threatening to become even more of a problem than it’s historically been.

The Royal Protector is already long suspected of rank heresy. The circumstances under which the Empress took back her throne are curious. No one disputes that it's wonderful that the coup has been crushed, but there's been a lot of talk.

This has every potential to be _problematic_.

And it's not even the only potentially problematic relationship they're dealing with.

“Yes,” he murmurs, and pinches the bridge of his nose. Suddenly he's so tired. It would be so wonderful to be back in the Tower and in his bed, dozing with the Outsider wrapped up in his arms. “I think I have to.”

Emily nods. The moon continues its upward creep. After another few moments of silence, she covers his hand with hers and squeezes. He looks at her and can make out the barest curve of her smile.

And he knows it's going to be all right.

“I have to say, I didn't know you liked—”

He coughs. “Yeah, well. It's been a long time.”

“Mm.” Her smile widens just a touch. “You never did seem all that taken aback about me and Wyman.”

Corvo rolls a shoulder. No, he wasn't taken aback. Concerned, a little, but not about Wyman herself. It was more about an old worry, one he'd been carrying since Emily was still fencing with sticks and chasing frogs around the water lock: that she would be fated to fall in love with someone sweet and good to her, someone very much worth loving, and never be able to show it openly.

He knows that pain so well.

“You know I like Wyman.”

Emily scoots a little closer to him, nudges his arm with her elbow. “I like her too. Very much.” She falls silent and leans back, shifting her focus from the tower to the sky. All the turning stars. “I don't know if I can like the Outsider.”

He ducks his head. He shouldn't be surprised that she's saying that, shouldn't have supposed she would say anything else, but the slight disappointment he feels is real.

“You don't have to like him.” His mouth twitches. “You just have to not kill him.”

Emily snorts, and when the silence returns it’s companionable. Not precisely comfortable, but in all likelihood this won't be a comfortable topic for a long while.

“I'll only kill him if he hurts you,” she says finally. “Deal?”

He chuckles quietly, offers her his hand to shake. She does so. “Deal.”

Because that seems fair enough.

~

As it turns out, Emily is perfectly capable of liking the Outsider. He dances with her at her wedding, after all.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I do intend to deliver on that tease at the end there. :D


	6. all that stuff's a sideshow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the Outsider first showed up at Dunwall Tower, Corvo called him pathetic. Turns out there's nothing in the world more pathetic than the Outsider when he's sick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These two. That is all.

The Royal Physician is new, and Corvo isn't quite used to her yet. She's a tall, extremely thin middle-aged woman with dark brown skin and long gray hair pulled into a tight coil, long and extremely thin features, and piercingly green eyes that make one feel rather like a rat nailed to a dissecting table. Uncomfortable. Her bedside manner is actually fairly good, in that she tends to inspire confidence with the sheer force of her aura of competence, but when she looks at Corvo he always gets the feeling that she’s evaluating his skeleton, possibly for the purpose of mounting it for scientific display after he's not using it anymore.

Now she's evaluating the Outsider, who's lying in bed in his own room and occasionally groaning. This morning, Corvo awoke to discover him covered in small pinkish spots and unusually warm to the touch. Over the course of the day, the spots have darkened to red and the warmth has risen into a full-blown fever—not a dangerously high one, and the Royal Physician doesn't seem overly worried, but the Outsider is extremely uncomfortable and he's making sure everyone within a hundred yards of him knows about it.

He's not customarily this much of a whiner, but he does sometimes tend toward the dramatic. Corvo has been trying to keep from smiling too much, at least where the Outsider can see.

“Definitely Tyvian measles,” the physician says. “Keep him in bed, give him plenty of water and herbal teas, cool baths or cloths for the fever. As far as food goes I'd stick to soups and dry crackers. He should be up and about within a week.” She scoops her thermometer and stethoscope into her bag and rises, walks swiftly on her extremely long legs to the door, turns and gives the Outsider a nod. “I'll look in on you in a day or two.”

She disappears, shutting the door behind her and leaving Corvo and the Outsider alone. Corvo sits down on the edge of the bed. The Outsider peers blearily and spottily at him from under the compress he's holding against his forehead.

Corvo squeezes his arm. “She said you'll be fine.”

“I don't feel fine.”

“You _will be_. Future tense. For now, yeah, it'll be pretty miserable.”

The Outsider groans again and closes his eyes. “My bones hurt. I didn't know bones could hurt. I don't want to have them anymore, take them away.”

Corvo casts his gaze ceilingward. “Would you quit it? You're not dying.”

“Think you could fix that for me?” The Outsider breathes a laugh, and Corvo shoots him a look; that isn't the kind of thing about which the Outsider customarily jokes except in his moments of darker—or especially light, although that's much rarer—humor. He looks flushed, and Corvo doesn't think it's merely the warm tone of the lamplight. Outside the sky is deepening from red to the blue-black of a deep bruise. “I'm sorry, I know. But put yourself in my position. I've never been _sick_ before. Not that I recall, anyway.”

“I can put myself in your position, I had it already. I was only a kid but I remember what it was like.”

The Outsider opens his eyes, squints. Corvo recalls that his own eyes hurt as well when he was in the worst of the feverish ordeal—they felt swollen, as if someone had punched him. “You have?”

Corvo gives him half a shrug. Once the Outsider would have already known about all of this, but they're continually running up against information which he has, for one reason or another, not fully retained. “Sure. Almost everyone has. You get it when you're a child, you get better, you never get it again. It's not some huge passion play, at least not for most people. It can be a lot worse if you get it when you're older, though,” he adds, a trifle ominously. “People _do_ die of it.”

The Outsider scowls at him. “Stop mocking my suffering.”

“Stop giving me such easy material.” Corvo smiles—a mix of sardonic and fond—and bends down, brushing his lips against the Outsider’s hot cheek. “Make the best of it. I'll tend to you.”

The Outsider breaks into a small, slightly wobbly smile of his own. “Wait on me hand and foot?”

“Night and day.”

“Do you need to be dressed for that?”

Corvo arches a brow. “Are you saying you want me to dress like a nurse?”

“I'm saying I want you to not be dressed at all.” The Outsider breathes a laugh that shades off into a pathetic whimper. “If I'm not fit to do anything with you, I can at least look at you.”

Corvo curls his fingers around the Outsider’s hand, lifts it to his mouth, kisses the knuckles. “To the extent that I can avoid scandalizing the servants and Emily, I'll wear as little as possible.”

 _Scandal_. It's not as if they don't all know. Despite his initial best efforts, everyone knows by now. Everyone diplomatically pretends not to, and he and the Outsider maintain the appearance of separate rooms and separate beds and don't always share one of them, but in Dunwall Tower the Royal Protector and his very young and bizarrely nameless lover are a wildly open secret.

Not quite as wildly open a secret as he and Jessamine were—at least he and the Outsider don't have a child, nor will they—but it's near to that.

So far it hasn't been a problem. For the moment, Corvo is leaving the future to itself.

“Acceptable.” The Outsider closes his eyes, and he releases the cloth, drops his hand onto his stomach. “I don't care what you wear,” he murmurs. “I just want you here.”

Corvo kisses his other hand again. “I'm not going anywhere.”

“Not until I'm better?”

“And not after that.”

He doesn't. He stays there until the Outsider’s breathing slows and deepens into sleep, and then he pulls the coverlet up over the Outsider’s chest, places the now-mostly dry cloth in the basin by the bed and turns the oil lamp down low.

But he stays for a while after that, gazing down at the Outsider’s flushed and spotty and heart-stoppingly beautiful face in the soft glow of the lamp and the light of the rising moon, and what he feels in his bones isn't pain. It's something he has no word for.

Except he does. It'll just take him a bit longer to say it.

 


	7. where our battles are over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the boy who used to be the Outsider, the rare observances of Abbey feast days in Dunwall Tower are... awkward. To put it mildly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finished another playthrough of DotO this afternoon and realized that something I hadn’t really dealt with directly in this series is what the hell is up with the Abbey now that the Outsider is no longer the Outsider. So that is this. Hope you enjoy. ❤️

“Does it bother you, though? You can tell me if it does.”

The Outsider shrugs. It’s a noncommittal shrug, at least to Corvo’s eyes. As far as eyes go, the Outsider’s are fixed very firmly on the peach tart in front of him and not at all on Corvo’s.

The Outsider prods the tart with his fork, flakes away a portion of the crust and dips the tines into the sticky golden filling, which is dyed an even deeper hue by the lamplight. There’s still a bit of the day falling in a thin glow through the glass above them, but the cold months are settling in and the days are short and dim.

Corvo waits another moment or two, drinking his coffee and trying not to read too much into the silence. His mouth twists; the servant who brought the coffee into Corvo’s bedchamber is new and has put too much of a far-too-sweet Morleyan liqueur in it.

At last the Outsider sets his fork down, his lips quirking wryly. “Do I like hiding in my room until it’s all over? Not especially, no.” He pauses, sighs. “I know why you have to keep it up. The last thing any of us need is for the Abbey to take offense, find a justification to start doing the poking around they’ve wanted to do for years. But if you’re wondering if it’s uncomfortable to exist less than a couple hundred yards away from a bunch of people who hate you chanting about how much they hate you, the answer is yes.”

Corvo gnaws at the inside of his cheek. This is something they’ve gone months without discussing openly—in part because Abbey feast days significant enough to involve a service in the Tower chapel are relatively infrequent, and it’s only happened a few times. The first time, the Outsider merely absented himself, reappearing as if from nowhere and without comment after the High Overseer and his retinue left. Corvo considered asking about it then, but there was a determination in the way the Outsider appeared to be pretending nothing out of the ordinary had been going on.

One can only maintain that kind of thing for so long.

“I’m sorry,” Corvo says quietly, and the Outsider waves a hand.

“Don’t. I told you, I know why you keep it up.”

“I was honestly considering leaving the fucking thing the way it was.” There’s sudden heat in Corvo’s voice, and it’s genuine. Part of him had been pleased to see the state Delilah had reduced it to, had taken outright satisfaction in its desecration. He never liked the place, even before he had a very specific reason to dislike it, and for the last decade and a half he’s avoided it as much as possible. “Boarding it up, concocting some kind of excuse to keep it like that.”

The Outsider gives him another rueful smile. His eyes are hooded, and like the tart filling they appear darker than they are. “I doubt Emily would have argued much.”

Corvo snorts. Emily bears no affection for the Abbey and never really has; a High Overseer helping to orchestrate the murder of one’s mother has a way of souring feelings.

But even if that hadn’t happened... The Abbey of the Everyman is harsh to the point of cruelty, often shading into outright sadism. Jessamine felt no particular fondness for it, either.

“Sometimes I think about what it would be like if we could dissolve it,” he murmurs, drains the last of the coffee and sets the cup down rather hard. “Just take the entire thing apart. Declare them outlawed. Dismantle the clergy. Seize their property, sell it off. Have a bonfire, see how they like it when it’s _their_ books burning.”

He raises his eyes; the Outsider is gazing at him with an inscrutable expression, once more toying with the fork.

“You hate them more than I do,” the Outsider says softly.

Corvo arches a brow. This is unexpected; he had assumed the lack of obvious passion on the Outsider’s part was more to do with the nature of his anger at this particular kind of injustice, which tends to be as stone-cold as Corvo’s is fiery. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. I don’t really hate them at all.”

Corvo blinks him, utterly nonplussed. “Why _not?_ They sure as hell hate _you_.”

The Outsider shrugs again and sits back, rubbing a hand down his face and tipping his clear eyes up to the glass panes and the last of the daylight. “I don’t know. Hate is exhausting. I have more than enough things to be exhausted about. But also...”

His eyes slip closed as he trails off. Corvo looks at him, silent; he can sense the wheels of that strange young-old mind turning. Not that they ever _stop_ turning—he’s well aware that sometimes the vast dimensions and ancient workings of the Outsider’s mind come close to driving him into fits of helpless frustration—but now they’re spinning toward a specific object.

He looks so young. He looks younger than he ever did in the Void, and younger still since he arrived in Dunwall; months of decent rest and nourishment have subtly smoothed out the sharpest angles of his face and filled in the hollows in his cheeks. Yet he appears older than Corvo knows he was when he was murdered. Even as a human, it’s difficult to place his age for certain at all.

He is, Corvo supposes, no one single age. Fifteen, four thousand—an alien mingling of the two.

Four thousand years of being feared and hated, even though the sources of that fear and hate have changed. Even the fanatical devotion of a cult isn’t far from hatred in its way, not least from a cult determined to keep you frozen in the loneliest of nightmares.

“You know what they go through to become Overseers, of course,” the Outsider says finally.

Corvo nods—stops himself and feels vaguely silly; the Outsider hasn’t opened his eyes.

“I do. It’s brutal.”

The Outsider nods. “Most of them are only children. Most of them never have a say. They don’t ask for what’s done to them. First they’re tortured into accepting it. Then they’re tormented into wanting it.” He opens his eyes, and suddenly it’s a little difficult to meet them. It’s a little difficult to face what’s there in that piercing clarity. “And at the end they’re twisted into hurting other people the way they’ve been hurt. Why should I hate them? I pity them.” He pulls in a breath. “And I suppose I feel for them.”

Corvo shakes his head. Oddly—and decidedly unwelcome—his anger is beginning to turn in the Outsider’s direction. Not because he doesn’t understand what the Outsider is saying, but in fact because he does.

Which if anything makes it even more vexing.

“They’re grown men, not children. They make choices.” He points a finger at the boy sitting across the table from him. “Just like the rest of us. Like _me_. We’re responsible for what we do.”

“Don’t lecture me.” The Outsider’s voice is calm, but there’s a vein of four-thousand-year-old ice running through it. He crosses his arms. “I’m not saying they’re not responsible. I’m saying I don’t hate them. I hate what they do, but I don’t hate them. If _you_ want to hate them, go ahead, but don’t get pissy at me if I don’t join you.”

Corvo exhales, drops his gaze to his hands. He’s slightly resentful at being chastened, but chastened he is, and he clenches his left hand into a fist and watches the Mark flare between the leather bands.

More than once he’s wondered why he still has it. Why it didn’t vanish when the Outsider ceased to be. Why it reappeared at all, once Delilah’s magic was undone.

The Outsider reaches across the table, lays a pale hand over Corvo’s. Corvo raises his eyes and finds a smile not wry but instead rueful and faintly sad.

“We make choices. But we’re still shaped by what happens to us. What’s done to us.” He sweeps his thumb along Corvo’s knuckles. “I saw futures where you made different choices after I Marked you. But they were never as likely as the choices you did make. Because you are who you are, Corvo.” For the briefest moment, the clouds over his smile blow away. “And I love who you are. So there.”

Corvo coughs a laugh; something in his chest loosens, and he turns his hand palm-up and weaves their fingers, squeezes. “I love you too.”

“For some reason. Anyway.” The Outsider squeezes back and waves his free hand in a gesture Corvo can’t quite parse. “To tell you the truth, I thought they’d have fallen apart by now without me around to hate. No idea why I didn’t realize that they’d just lie about it.”

“You think they do know you aren’t there anymore?”

“Oh, they know.” The Outsider’s quick laugh is tinged with scorn. “The Sisters know, at any rate. There’s no way they don’t. They were terrified of me being gone. They knew exactly what it would mean for them.”

Corvo’s brow furrows. Of course, the lying. People like the Overseers are already well-acquainted with the practice of lies. And they’ll keep up the lying for as long as they can, until—

“But sooner or later they won’t be able to lie anymore,” the Outsider adds, low. “It’ll be harder and harder for them to convince people. The faithful will drift away. The ones who groveled at my shrines, they’ll try to convince themselves too, because no one wants to live in a world where their god is dead. But I won’t be there to pray to and I won’t be there to hate, and eventually even the most stubborn of them won’t be able to escape the truth. So you see...” His mouth twitches. “I don’t have to hate them, and you don’t have to destroy them. Billie and Daud did the work for us. All we have to do is wait them out.”

Corvo looks at him in dimly bemused wonder. Perhaps it’s an old man’s rigidity of thinking, or perhaps it’s lazily unexamined assumptions, but— “That actually never occurred to me.”

“See? There are all sorts of reasons why it’s good that I’m around.” The Outsider pulls his hand away and pushes to his feet, steps to Corvo’s chair, and without waiting to be invited he insinuates himself between Corvo’s knees, sinking down to straddle his thigh and draping his arms over the larger man’s shoulders. “I can suffer the Abbey’s ridiculous feast days. We’ll outlive them, all three of us.”

Corvo settles his hands on the Outsider’s hips, regarding him with amusement—and a healthy interest. This seems to be heading in some intriguing directions. “You seem awfully certain of that.”

“Mhmm. I’ve seen it. Or close enough.” The Outsider ducks his head, and the kiss is light but it lingers. “You know how I think we should celebrate this _holiest_ of days?”

“Do tell.”

“I think,” the Outsider murmurs, “we should see how many of the Strictures we can break in, oh...” His expression turns thoughtful. “Half an hour?”

Corvo laughs and pulls them flush and this time the kiss is much deeper and a little rough, edged with teeth. “Only half an hour?”

“Well, I mean, we can take longer.” The Outsider’s voice is turning husky, his hips rolling a little; in the periphery of his vision, Corvo is calculating the distance to the bed and how quickly they can cross it. “Can— _ah_ —take all the time you want.”

In the end, with a bit of creativity it’s not difficult to shamelessly violate all seven in extremely short order. But Lying Tongue turns out to be the most fun.

 


	8. give me both your hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The morning after the Outsider’s nightmare and their first kiss, Corvo meditates on what’s come before, and what might come next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (If you’re also subscribed to When It’s Right It’ll Find You, you probably noticed that I updated the wrong fic. Oops, sorry about that.)
> 
> The world is terrible so fic seems more important than ever, so I set aside some time to write some wholesomeness. If you’re feeling bad I hope it helps. ❤️ And I really hope you’re taking this seriously and doing whatever you can to slow the spread—wash your hands, keep as much physical distance from others as possible, etc. Stay smart and safe and we’ll make it through this together. 
> 
> And thanks as always for reading. ❤️❤️

Corvo Attano sits in the pavilion with the Outsider asleep in his arms.

Dawn isn’t yet breaking, but it’s not far off; the sky is easing into that reverse twilight that announces the coming sunrise, all shades of gray with the slightest implication of pink. The blood poised to flow back into a body about to come to life.

He shifts as much as he dares, and it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. The pillar is hard and cool against his spine—not altogether comfortable. The marble floor beneath him is the same. He’s slipped down a bit from his initial posture and the top of his ass is beginning to go numb.

And the Outsider is asleep in his arms.

He keeps coming back to that fact. He hasn’t the foggiest notion of what to do with it.

The Outsider is relatively tall but slim, was in fact downright skinny when he first showed up and has only just started to fill out into something healthier. Yet he feels strangely heavy, leaning against Corvo’s side and perilously close to slumping into his lap. Corvo tries to secure him, tightens the arm around his bony shoulders. The weight against Corvo’s frame is adding to his mild discomfort, but he’s having difficulty minding it just at the moment, because it’s as if years of tension have finally left the Outsider’s body, bled out of him and flowed away to join the great dark ocean. More than years. Centuries, maybe. All that time in the Void, his pristine and faintly smug affect, how he seemed supremely unbothered by anything, feeling nothing for any of what he observed but bloodless interest.

That hadn’t been true. The Outsider hasn’t said as much but Corvo is now certain. This furious cyclone of emotion the Outsider now carries around inside himself didn’t come from nowhere. It didn’t appear where no lashing wind was. Perhaps the Outsider didn’t feel it, but it was lurking somewhere in the heart of the Void for all those thousands of years, and now that he’s left the Void he has no defense against it.

No defense against his memories. What the Outsider can recall is fractured and incomplete, yes, but Corvo can’t stop thinking about what he said barely an hour or so ago, the exhausted brokenness in his voice—and it had only been confirmation of what Corvo was already beginning to suspect.

_It's not even just remembering being killed. It's remembering being… unmade._

The thing the Outsider might have wanted most desperately to forget. And he can’t.

This isn’t a god pressing close to him, sleeping the sleep of the deeply weary but finally if temporarily at peace. This is a boy, a scared and lonely boy who never asked for any of what happened to him, any of what was _done to_ him, and the palpable terror he seems to feel whenever he’s brought in mind of those four thousand years of godhood is something which, up until scant days ago, Corvo could never have imagined he would ever see.

The Outsider, terrified of the Void. Terrified of what he was. Hopeless about what he’s become.

Maybe that’s why. Something like that, something so viscerally astonishing, so raw, and so familiar—maybe that’s why it felt like the most natural thing in the world to reach for him. To kiss him. To kiss him for as long as he did... and it was unlike any kiss Corvo has ever experienced. Because Jessamine kissed with her whole self, opened to him and invited him in with so much more than her mouth, but Jessamine never kissed him like he was all that was keeping her alive.

 _I need you,_ the Outsider’s kiss told him, and more clearly than the hands clutching at his chest and shoulders. _I need you so much, please don’t leave me, if you leave me I’m lost._

Nothing new in that. Now that Corvo thinks back, now that he truly considers it and knows what to look for, it’s been clear as day since the moment the Outsider walked through the gates of Dunwall Tower.

_So what do we do now?_

His head falls gently back against the pillar and he stares up at the domed ceiling overhead. The sky is lightening further, tinting warmer. The world around them is coming into being, and in myriad ways large and small, it’s different from the world on which the sun set. This is a world in which the Outsider is sleeping in his arms, and although he’s not distressed by that—

He isn’t completely certain _what_ he feels.

What should he feel? Shocked, although in truth the signs were all there long before now? Exhilarated? Disturbed?

Guilty?

Jessamine’s memorial plaque is across the floor from him. He can just make out the inscription, her name. Her bones are silent and dry below it, and while some people feel strong attachment to the corpse of a loved one, he knows it was only ever a shell. Especially so now that Emily has released her spirit into the cosmos to finally find the peace she always should have had.

The peace the Outsider denied her.

So should he feel angry?

If he didn’t before, he can’t summon it up now. It was done. It’s over. It’s gone.

The Abbey preaches that the righteous are greeted after death by peaceful oblivion. Corvo has never been especially interested in whether that’s totally correct; whether or not one ceases to exist when one dies has always had little bearing on how he cares to live his own life, and for him the Void holds none of the marrow-deep dread it does even for the Outsider. But now, looking at Jessamine’s name, he wonders if some lingering part of her can see this.

“Would you blame me?” he whispers, and the Outsider stirs, mutters, relaxes again. “Would you feel like I’m betraying you?”

No. It’s a ludicrous and vaguely insulting question. She wouldn’t feel that way at all. In all the long years since losing her, he’s never wanted anyone else—hasn’t denied himself, hasn’t purposefully kept some kind of celibacy; has simply never _wanted_ anyone—but would she have demanded that it last? Would she have expected him to remain the mourning widower—even though she never married him—until death took him too? Would she have wanted him to be alone?

He’s not alone. He has Emily, and that’s been more than enough for him.

But now the Outsider is asleep in his arms.

And perhaps the Outsider isn’t the only one who feels a need.

 _When you reached for him,_ she murmurs to him—himself talking to himself in her voice, he knows perfectly well that’s all it is but it sounds so real— _it wasn’t merely because you could sense how much he needed you. Hasn’t it been better with him here? Hasn’t it been good? Haven’t you enjoyed being with him, hasn’t the world been just a little brighter with him near you? Haven’t you seen so many things with fresh eyes, seeing them through his?_

_When he first revealed himself to you, he was a kind of monster. But now you can feel the gentleness in him, the kindness. He cares for you. And he wants so much to be a good man. He’s looking for someone to help him. Didn’t you already say it, when you told Emily he was here? He needs someone to help him—perhaps you need someone to help._

_If the stars are generous, you will have many years more to live. But you’re well into the autumn of your life, my love. Now, with him, the world might be made new. You might recapture a little of the spring, before you finally enter the sleep of your winter._

The Outsider stirs again, and as he does his head tilts in such a way that a shaft of sunlight falls onto his face and the patch of bare chest uncovered by the fall of his dressing gown as the sun breaks over the horizon. The Outsider is still very pale, nearly as bone-white as he was in the Void, but in that shaft of sun his skin looks flushed and healthy, as if the Void never touched him at all. As if he never died. As if he has no terrible memories to be haunted by.

His long black lashes flutter against his cheeks, his lips parted, and in a sort of wonder Corvo traces a fingertip down his jaw to his chin, beneath it to the warmth of his throat, feels his pulse strong and steady.

He was dead, maybe. But now he’s so alive.

That warm throat works, another flutter of his lashes, and the Outsider opens his clear gray eyes, blinking in owlish confusion. He makes no move to pull away.

“Corvo?”

“It’s all right,” Corvo says softly, and combs a hand through the Outsider’s tousled hair. “Sleep. I’ll stay with you.”

The Outsider’s confusion doesn’t dissipate, but he also seems willing to accept it, because he bobs his head in something that might be a nod and his eyes fall closed again. The looseness retakes his muscles like an army reclaiming territory and this time Corvo can’t stop him from sliding—and doesn’t really care to, merely supporting him as the Outsider settles in his lap and slumbers on.

This isn’t a god. This is a boy, and while Corvo doubts very much that the fear and bewilderment of the day before has left him, from now on it might be the smallest bit better.

Or it might be better by quite a lot.

“I’ll stay with you,” Corvo repeats, stroking the Outsider’s hair. _What do we do now?_ He doesn’t know.

They’ll just have to figure it out together.  
  


 


End file.
